Frankenstein and the Anatomy of Horror

James B. Twitchell

The Georgia Review, 37:1 (Spring 1983), 41-78

{41} WHAT is horror, and why are we both attracted to and
repulsed by it? We are now living through one of the most
explosive periods yet experienced in the cycle of shudder art.
Post-Vietnam horror is everywhere: in the movies (The
Exorcist, Carrie, The Omen), on television
(the evening news, Saturday-morning cartoons), in books (see
movies, above), in popular music (the "horror rock" of Alice
Cooper, Kiss) and even politics (The White House Horrors). It is
not unusual that works of horror should explode in such a burst;
it certainly has happened this way before: in the science
fiction and the Hammer Studio
movies in the late 1950's and 1960's; in Universal Studio
monster movies of the 1930's; around the turn of the century in
the works of Stevenson, Stoker, and others associated with the
Order of the Golden Dawn; in the "bloody pulps" of the 1850's as
well as in the stories of Poe; and before that in the first
great unfolding of "modern horror," the Gothic novel.

Horror art seems to move in bursts, and doubtless these
outbreaks are connected to cultural anxieties. The first rule of
shivers seems to be that horror art will be most prevalent in
times of gradual cultural shifts when people need some "object"
toward which they can direct their anxieties. When the object
and the anxiety connect, we can very often find ins horror art a
prediction of how the society is resolving its fears. So, for
instance, in the 1950's we entertained a spate of outer-space
monsters at the same time we were embarked on the projects at
NASA; in the 1960's eve were plagued with ecological mutants
just as we started to realize the fragility of our planet; and
in the 1970's we let loose a gaggle of childmonsters as we
started rearranging our feeling about population and diminishing
resources. We now seem particularly frightened of women; in
fact, one of the most disturbing trends in modern horror is male
sexual {42} violence against "liberated" (i.e., independent)
women, as in Dressed to Kill, When a Stranger Calls,
Halloween, He Knows You're Alone, Friday the Thirteenth --
all of which may tell us more than we want to know about the
sadistic misogyny engendered by the Women's Movement. We appear
to want horror art when we are anxious and insecure, not when we
are truly frightened; hence the 1940's -- when there really was
a Fascist monster across the seas -- were relatively barren of
horror iconographies. In fact, when there actually is something
menacing us we seem to want musical comedies.

This interpretation of artificial horror is rather
commonsensical, of course, no more sophisticated than the fact
that we tend to be more interested in pornography during times
of sexual repression. Horror art, rather like pornography, seems
to fill a special need, perhaps biological as well as
psychological, a need to express anxiety. In fact, the word
horror" carries this reference within its etymology -- the Latin
verb horrére means "to stand on end or bristle"
and refers to the way the hairs on the neck become erect when
there is some threat to physical well-being. Horror, the
aesthetic horror of art, is of course psychological, but it
excites the same physiological response: we brace ourselves as
if preparing for flight or fight.

Not only does make-believe horror appeal in times of cultural
shift, it also seems to be attractive during discrete stages of
individual maturation. And the period of growth when horror
seems to be almost essential is during what Freudians call
latency: a time of incubation, a time when the early
adolescent starts to assimilate the enormous amount of sexual
data he or she has unconsciously collected.1 In no way is
this a dormant period (although latency unfortunately has that
connotation); rather it refers to the process of sexual
becoming, specifically becoming male or female. It is a
bittersweet time: the death knell of childhood, the end of
asexuality, the time when polymorphous perversity will be
perverse, yet, {43} it is also a coming into one's own, a
gathering together of the self, a rite of passage across the
meridian of sexuality. For sexuality now no longer refers to a
vague but crucial distinction between others; it now refers to
ourselves and what we are becoming. And what we are becoming, in
terms of sociobiology, are creatures capable of reproduction.

It is at this stage of individual development that horror seems
especially provocative, and monsters who had often populated the
periphery of fairy tales now come front and center to dominate
the sagas of adolescence. You need only attend a few horror
movies or listen to popular "horror" rock music to realize that
this is the same audience which gulps down quantities of pulp
fiction and horror comics. The squeals you hear have a decidedly
high pitch.

But why should the horror stimmung be so appealing to
adolescents in latency? Clearly part of the reason is that there
is a joyous shudder associated with, and embedded in, horror;
for remember, this is the same audience that will queue up for
hours for the privilege of having their stomachs lifted and neck
hair raised by riding the roller-coaster at the fair. This
excitement is not without some social utility, for on the
downward rids there is ample time for the boys to practice
bravery by biting their nether lip, while squealing girls
perfect their own control by surrender. But there is another
reason for the susceptibility of adolescents to horror that
tells us much about the nature of the experience: in the great
sagas of modern horror -- and by this I mean the myths that base
have been continually retelling for the last few generations
(vampire, werewolf, Dr. Jekyll/Mr. Hyde, Frankenstein monster)
-- there is invariably a buried text of sexuality that addresses
itself precisely to the overwhelming problems of budding, but
confused, sexual desire. These sagas are centered on problems of
reproduction: where did I come from? why am I sexual and most
important, what am I going to do about it? 2

It would be nice to think that these questions could be answered
candidly in society, but of course they can't be -- in large
part because they are not yet even phraseable as questions. They
are only vague murmurings beneath the surface. When they do
bubble up, they are usually suppressed by an older generation
(whose impatience betrays its own inability to find the answers)
and/or quelled by the adolescents themselves (who compound
confusion first by neglect, then by panic, and finally {44} by
sublimation).3 But these confusions must somehow
be addressed, and if you look carefully at horror art you will
see this interrogation occurring.

The two most popular initiation myths that employ horror in our
culture are the vampire and the Frankenstein monster. Although I
have elsewhere tried to make the case that the "family romance"
of Dracula (both in print and on film) plays out the
sexual anxieties of both male and female, let me briefly
reiterate it here, since these two stories form a kind of
monster dyptych, each completing the other.4 Essentially a
young male is interested in the vampire saga because he sees in
that scenario an "acting out" of his own buried desire (i.e.,
that he may "conquer" the special woman, the mother who is
virginal to the boy, and command her attention so that he will
be the only male in her life). As the victim's sensual reactions
suggest, the vampire "bite" is the displaced sex act. The price
of this Oedipal fantasy is literally horrendous -- it is incest
-- and so the guilty vampire must be made to suffer by living
forever with an insatiable blood-lust. However, to a young woman
in the audience, the female "victim" in the story is her
projected self. The female virgin is a willing, although not
overly conscious, co-conspirator (in the saga she always does
something -- unhasps the window, opens the door -- so the
vampire can enter) who is carefully inducted into sexuality by
the older man, the vampire, the father. Again the price of
Oedipal fantasy is to be paid, for she is inducted into the
sorority of undead (read "sexual") and must also suffer
blood-lust for immortality. In other words the cost of sexual
curiosity and wish fulfillment is always computed within the
story; you can ask the questions, you can even enact the tabooed
desire, but if you do you will also pay the piper.

Although the vampire has everything any teen-ager wants -- sex
without confusion, plenty of money, an eternity of all-night
parties and allday sleep -- when we decode his story we see that
it is full of sexual instruction. Essentially, horror can be
thought of as the price exacted by the superego to let the ego
learn about the id. For the most part we are not {45} really
interested in horror, in having our neck hairs raised; rather we
are interested in something for which we must experience horror,
namely knowledge of forbidden levels of sexuality. We may think
the Oedipal fantasies are the means to evoke horror, but the
causality is mistaken. Horror is the means to examine
sexuality. What makes the transformations from Dr. Jekyll to
Mr. Hyde, or from man (Lyle Talbot) to Wolfman, horrible is not
that they are painful but rather that they must be undertaken
before the protagonist can act out the desires of the id. It is
almost as if the superego, which is just coming into its own
during latency, says: "Okay, if you want to find out how that
feral and exciting part of you operates, you will first have to
pay the tax of horror. You will have to endure the pains of a
transformation into a monster from which you may not be able to
escape." We may think that it is the transformation we're
interested in, but really we are much more interested in what
guilt-free sexual adventures Mr. Hyde or the Wolfman has in
store. The main difference between these sagas and the vampire
story is that here the transformations occur before the sexual
knowledge; in the vampire story it comes after. But the
dreamlike desires are invariably the same: how can we learn what
we want to know and what will happen to us then. It seems that
if we want knowledge of tabooed sex, especially incest, what we
must experience along the way is horror. And this is true even
if we only wish to watch, not do. This is what makes dreams into
nightmares. But clearly for the adolescent it is worth it.

With this in mind, namely that horror is the means, not the end,
of sexual fantasies in latency, it may be instructive to look at
one of the great modern sagas in Western lore -- the tale of
Victor Frankenstein and his monster. Admittedly, Frankenstein is
unique as a saga, in that we actually have a generating "text"
(Mary Shelley's 1818/1831 novel), but most of what we know about
the story comes from nonprint media. The novel itself tells a
confusing story of a young man who creates a larger-than-life
humanoid which then destroys much of the creator's family before
presumably destroying himself. What distinguishes the story
through its many renditions is an overwhelming amount of
confusion. For instance, who is Frankenstein? If you ask your
local preteen-ager he will tell you it is the monster -- it is
not, of course; it is the protagonist. Then, if you ask about
this protagonist, you will probably be told he is an older man,
a doctor, a mad scientist. He is not: he is a most callow
youth. And if you ask how the audience feels about the
"monster," you will probably learn a very important fact. You
will learn that this character (like the other horror monster,
the vampire) is a figure of some sympathy. Al- {46} though it
might seem logical to return to the text to resolve these
ambiguities, that in itself is insufficient. We need to examine
the entire saga to see where the "horror" comes from, how it got
embedded into the text, and how it continues to exist there
regardless of the medium of transmission.

Frankenstein: The Printed Text

Frankenstein is, as George Levine has written, "one of
the great freaks of English literature."5 It is awkwardly written,
inconsistently plotted, peopled with a host of seemingly
superfluous characters, and full of the kind of inappropriate
longueurs that characterize artistic immaturity. A young
man, Robert Walton, writes his sister a verbatim account of what
a young scientist, Victor Frankenstein, has accomplished in
creating a "monster," who in turn has given young Frankenstein a
verbatim account of what has happened to him during four years
of the eighteenth century in Europe. This narrative Chinese-box
is a characteristic device of the early novel, especially the
Gothic, as it safely cocoons "meaning" inside a double layer of
stories. Yet, in spite of (and because of) all the obscuring
effects of these buried narratives and the ironic juxtapositions
of narrators, there is not enough authorial control to save the
tales from some incredible silliness as well as some profound
truths. Students of absurdities have a field day wondering how
Victor could create a being eight feet tall from the body parts
of ordinary men (to say nothing of the fact that Victor might
well have started creating life first on a less sophisticated
level); how this creature could become fluent in English and
French in less than a year (we are told he just happens to find
the books -- Milton, Plutarch, Goethe); why Victor did not
create a female partner sans reproductive apparatus to
quiet the monster; how the monster finds Victor's journal or a
regular-sized cloak that happens to fit someone of his
prodigious size; and all this is to completely overlook the
implausibilities (nay, impossibilities) of some of the time
sequences and the wild coincidences of serendipitous
meetings.

In this story, coincidence -- so much a staple of the Gothic
anyway -- is raised, I think deliberately, beyond the limits of
credulity. In fact, it is {47} taken into the levels of dream
life, where, after all, Mary Shelley says the story was first
enacted. However, hidden between the ludicrous coincidences is a
subtext of compelling interest that has nothing coincidental
about it at all; in fact, it is ruthlessly predetermined. A
young man creates a being and then spurns this creation, making
it monstrous. Much is made of the fact that this love
deprivation has transformed prelapsarian Adam into Satan:
"Remember that I am thy creature," says the monster. "I ought to
be thy Adam, but I am rather the fallen angel, whom thou drivest
from joy for no misdeed" (p.
95).6 In
his role as satanic scourge, the monster throttles Victor's
brother William and frames Justine, a family friend; harasses
Victor for more than a year; strangles Elizabeth, Victor's new
bride, on their wedding night; and leads Victor off on a
continental chase that ends in the Arctic wastes, where Victor
expires and the monster finally (supposedly) immolates
himself.

But what is so interesting about this story, or more
particularly, why should it have held our impassioned interest
for so many generations? As I mentioned earlier, for a modern
horror story to endure it must not only be adaptable into
different media but must also -- and more importantly -- be
appealing to either sex. Masculine horror (say, Maturin's
Melmoth the Wanderer) will be as soon neglected as
feminine horror (for instance, Ann Radcliffe's The Mysteries
of Udolpho), if only because the latency audience -- the
primary audience of horror art from the eighteenth century
onward -- is unable to be interested in specific sexual roles.
In my opinion, It is primarily the androgynous qualities and the
sublimated sexual aspects of Frankenstein that account for its
potency, even though the text seems -- like the original Dr.
Jekyll and Mr. Hyde -- to be singularly devoid of any sexual
let alone incestuous. references.7

Frankenstein: From the Male Point of View

{48} The "male" part of the myth is clearly the second half:
what the monster does, rather than how he was created. In fact,
the whole creation scene is condensed into a few sentences at
the beginning of chapter five:

I had worked hard for nearly two years, for the sole purpose of
infusing life into an inanimate body. For this I had deprived
myself of rest and health. I had desired it with an ardour that
far exceeded moderation; but now that I had finished, the beauty
of the dream vanished, and breathless horror and disgust filled
my heart. Unable to endure the aspect of the being I had
created, I rushed out of the room. . . . (p. 56)

Victor abandons his creation ostensibly because it is
unaesthetic, because it has "watery eyes that seemed almost of
the same color as the dun-white sockets in which they were set,
[a] shriveled complexion and straight black lips." Never once
does Victor think what he has done is presumptuous or Faustian
or sacrilegious -- only the critics think that. In fact, Victor
really doesn't know why he made this creature in the first
place, other than it was the result of "my obsession." Initially
he doesn't even think the creature monstrous and so repeatedly
calls him a "daemon," a word which originally meant a neutral
spirit before becoming appropriated by the Christian fathers to
mean evil spirit, as in "demon."8

Once "born" the creature must be "educated," and his schooling
occurs in the rather awkward episodes where the eight-foot
daemon is literally slid in behind the De Lacey household to
participate passively in a {49} surrogate family. This is more
than a convenient narrative device to resolve such problems as
language and socialization; this is a way to mature him to
Victor's level so that by the time he leaves, or rather is
ejected from, the bosom of the family, he is Victor's coeval,
ready to fulfill Victor's secret wishes. The metamorphosis from
noble savage to awkward adolescent (separated from the family)
takes only a few months in his speeded-up life, but he is now
fully ready to do what every teen-ager wants to do -- he can at
last "get even" with those who have restrained him.

But who is "getting even" with whom -- is it the daemon with
Victor, or Victor (via the creature) with his family? What the
monster does is in no way capricious; rather, from Victor's
point of view, it is the fulfillment of obsessively regressive
desire. The monster's first victim is Victor's baby brother,
William. Admittedly, the monster is in a bad mood (he has been
wounded while helping a little girl) when he happens on young
William, but William does not make him feel any better by
telling the creature to leave him alone; he is, after all, the
son of M. Frankenstein, municipal magistrate. That's enough for
the monster; it's all over for William and he is strangled
straightaway. In the monster's words: "I grasped his [William's]
throat to silence him, and in a moment he lay dead at my feet. I
gazed on my victim and my heart swelled with exultation and
hellish triumph. . . ." By wild happenstance, around
the child's neck is a locket with a picture of Mrs. Frankenstein
(Victor and William's mother), and the monster grasps it and
gazes in rapt attention:

I took it; it was a portrait of a most lovely woman. In spite of
my malignity, it softened and attracted me. For a few moments I
gazed with delight on her dark eyes, fringed by deep lashes and
her lovely lips; but presently my rage returned, I remembered
that I was forever deprived of the delights that such beautiful
creatures could bestow and that she whose resemblance I
contemplated would, in regarding me, have changed that air of
divine benignity to one expressive of disgust and affright. (p. 136)

Just the sight of Victor's mother is sufficient to melt the
monster's rage. Now happening to pass by is Justine, Victor's
surrogate sister who has been cared for by the Frankenstein
family.9 She
stops for a short early {50} morning nap -- it takes all of a
minute -- in a nearby shed, and the daemon "places the portrait
securely in one of the folds of her dress." It is a propitious
act, which eventually leads to Justine's being tried and
convicted of William's murder. Strangely enough, however, it
will be Victor who admits responsibility. For later he learns
that, sick with a fever (repressed guilt?), he has called
himself "the murderer of William, of Justine" (p. 169). Precisely what he
means we do not learn at that point, but we already have a hint
that the monster is dutifully enacting the desires of his
creator.

We are now given a short reprieve during which Victor receives a
most peculiar letter from home. His father writes:

I confess, my son, that I have always looked forward to your
marriage with ["your cousin" in the 1818 text] our dear
Elizabeth as the tie of our domestic comfort and the stay of my
declining years. You were attached to each other from your
earliest infancy; you studied together, and appeared, in
dispositions and tastes, entirely suited to one another. But so
blind is the experience of man that what I conceived to be the
best assistants to my plan may have entirely destroyed it. You,
perhaps, regard her as your sister, without any wish that she
might become your wife. Nay, you may have met with another whom
you may love; and considering yourself as bound in honor to
Elizabeth, this struggle may occasion that poignant misery which
you appear to feel. (p. 144)

To be sure, in the 1831 edition Mary Shelley has struck the word
"cousin," but the damage, so to speak, has been done: truth has
leaked through. Elizabeth is somehow a member of the family, but
what member? To find out we need to recall Victor's previous
relations with Elizabeth. Here, for instance, is her induction
into the "family circle":

On the evening previous to her being brought to my home, my
mother had said playfully, "I have a pretty present for my
Victor -- tomorrow he shall have it." And when, on the morrow,
she presented Elizabeth to me as her promised gift, 1, with
childish seriousness, interpreted her words literally and looked
upon Elizabeth as mine -- mine to protect, love, and cherish.
All praises bestowed on her I received as made to a possession
of my own. We called each other familiarly by the name of
cousin. No word, no expression could body forth the kind of
relation in which she stood to me -- my more than sister, since
till death she was to be mine only. (p. 35)

{51} So it is with good reason that Victor responds to his
father's suggestion "with horror and dismay," for Elizabeth
seems more than a cousin, more even than a sister, more perhaps
like a mother.

Victor has a pressing problem before he can consider a wife,
however: the daemon has first demanded a mate of his own.
Consistent with his earlier problem-solving behavior, Victor
first swoons at the news and then embarks on a leisurely trip
that takes him across the continent to England and then up to
the Orkney Islands. Here in splendid isolation he again engages
in the "filthy process" of creation (p. 156), this time to make the
companion for the monster -- the female who will become in a
much later cinematic operation (thanks to popular confusion of
the proper name) the eponymic "Bride of Frankenstein."10

Victor typically has second thoughts and recants on his
promise. His love-sick daemon is distraught and first implores,
then threatens, but to no avail; Victor will not be swayed.
Finally as the creature turns on his heel to be gone, he makes
one last promise to his creator: "I will go; but remember, I
shall be with you on your wedding night" (p. 161). This is a powerfully
ambiguous threat; surely the monster is promising vengeance, but
on whom -- Victor or the bride? Victor -- ever the egotist --
thinks the intended victim will be himself, but he acts as if it
were to be his wife. We know better: if the monster wanted
Victor, he could dispatch him any time he wished. The monster
wants the bride, and Victor subconsciously knows it.

After this threat Victor falls into the requisite "deep sleep,"
and the plot is driven through some rather conventional Gothic
territory: the monster kills Victor's best friend, Henry
Clerval, and frames Victor (who is freed, thanks to the good
offices of his father); Victor makes some desultory attempts at
suicide, but most importantly he is gently nudged by Elizabeth
to think again about the unthinkable. She writes:

You well know, Victor, that our union had been the favourite
plan of your parents ever since our infancy. We were told this
when young, and taught to look forward to it as an event that
would certainly take place. We were affectionate playfellows
during childhood, and, I believe, dear and valued friends to one
{52} another as we grew older. But as brother and sister often
entertain a lively affection towards each other without desiring
a more intimate union, may not such also be our case? Tell me,
dearest Victor. Answer me, I conjure you, by our mutual
happiness, with simple truth -- Do you not love another? (p. 178)

Although Victor knows that the monster has always been true to
his Delphic threats, he writes back to Elizabeth of his
willingness, but warns her:

I have one secret, Elizabeth, a dreadful one; when revealed to
you, it will chill your frame with horror, and then, far from
being surprised at my misery, you will only wonder that I
survive what I have endured. I will confide this tale of misery
and terror to you the day after our marriage shall take place,
for, my sweet cousin, there must be perfect confidence between
us. (p. 180)

Just whom is he trying to protect -- himself or her?

The wedding day arrives and with it, of course, Victor's
ahedonic dread. Surely such dread is occasioned by incest -- the
references to brother/sister, Victor/Elizabeth have been an
unmistakable motif, even though we have often had to look
beneath the pentimento of the 1831 revisions. Simply put,
the monster has cleared the way for Victor to experience a level
of sexuality that has been tabooed, while at the same time
promising to appear on the Dies Irae to make sure the
marriage is not consummated. The frisson is generated not
only by sibling incest but also by hints of the Oedipal
relationship as well. We know this cannot be: we have been
assured that Victor's real mother has died from a disease
carried into the family by Elizabeth, her "present" for her son,
and that her dying wish was that her son marry this very girl. A
mother would never allow anything horrible to happen; wasn't
even Christabel's mother there to protect her from Geraldine? 11

To find out how Victor really perceives Elizabeth, rather than
how his mother wants him to, we need to recall the dream he had
during his post-monster-creation swoon. Here is the dream
complete with the daemon's cameo appearance:

{53} I was disturbed by the wildest dreams. I thought I saw
Elizabeth, in the bloom of health, walking in the streets of
Ingolstadt. Delighted and surprised, I embraced her, but as I
imprinted the first kiss on her lips, they became livid with the
hue of death; her features appeared to change, and I thought
that I held the corpse of my dead mother in my arms; a shroud
enveloped her form, and I saw the grave-worms crawling in the
folds of the flannel. I started from my sleep with horror, a
cold dew covered my forehead, my teeth chattered, and every limb
became convulsed; when, by the dim and yellow fight of the moon,
as it forced its way through the window shutters, I beheld the
wretch -- the miserable monster whom I had created. He held up
the curtain of the bed; and his eyes, if eyes they may be
called, were fixed on me. His jaws opened, and he muttered some
inarticulate sounds, while a grin wrinkled his cheeks. He might
have spoken, but I did not hear; one hand was stretched our,
seemingly to detain me, but I escaped and rushed downstairs. (p. 57)

When this element is considered, Victor's familial relationships
appear at last to fall into place; for if Elizabeth is the
displaced mother, then Victor will not be able to consummate the
marriage without utter psychological disintegration. Recall the
comment made by Henry Clerval after young William's death (not
just consoling but prescriptive): "Dear lovely child, he
now sleeps with his angel mother" (p. 71, italics added). But
Victor is still curious and he wants, as does the dreamer, to
get as close as possible to the forbidden event in this world.
Ironically it is the monster who will protect him, just as he
had earlier befriended him in Victor's Elizabeth/dead mother
dream. All along the daemon has acted out Victor's wishes: he
has destroyed family and friends, all in preparation for this
central encounter of Victor's fantasy. And now, here on Victor's
wedding night, Victor is so close to the sexually forbidden that
he is understandably hebephrenic. Elizabeth inquires, "What is
it that agitates you, my dear Victor?" and her husband can only
reply: ". . . this night is dreadful, very dreadful"
(p. 185). He now leaves her,
ostensibly to look for the monster; the monster conveniently
takes his cue and dispatches Elizabeth; Victor returns, swoons
at the sight of his dearly departed, then covers her face with a
handkerchief and for the first time in their entire relationship
"embraced her with ardour" (p.
186). Unlike brother William, who had had to die to lie with
his mother, Victor is still alive, so, of course, it is the
mother figure who must go. Now, however, there is guilt as well
as horror to deal with.

{54} The scene trembles with, as Coleridge said of his own
incest dreams, "desire with loathing strangely mixed." Victor
knows what the monster has promised, yet goes ahead with the
marriage; Victor knows the monster will be there on his wedding
night, yet he does not stay in the room to protect his bride;
like the little boy who has been told not to stand too close to
the fire, Victor's first response is to inch closer. Little
wonder he gets burned. He has had more sexual excitement than he
can withstand, and once again he dissembles.

If we had any doubts about the doppelgänger
connection between Victor and the monster, the last quarter of
the book resolves them.12 For from now on Victor pursues the
monster to set things right, just as earlier the monster had
dogged Victor for what he felt was just. First the shadow chases
the man, then the man chases the shadow. Victor's repressed
desires have broken the surface and he must now try to bury them
again. It is almost as if Victor's ego, having liberated his
monstrous id, now feels compelled to return to some
psychological stasis. But his superego -- so to speak -- will
have none of it now and so unity is denied. Victor
monomaniacally pursues his "devil" (the "daemon" has now become
"demon") to the ends of the civilized world, "more as a task
enjoined by heaven, as a mechanical impulse of some power of
which I was unconscious, than as the ardent desire of my soul"
(pp. 194-95).

Here, appropriately, Victor's narrative ends, and we are
returned to Robert Walton's epistolary frame. Victor is rescued
from the ice-packs of insanity just long enough to warn Walton,
another curious seeker after forbidden knowledge, to turn
back.13
Victor expires, but the monster {55} lingers on to let us know
that even now he is not satisfied. He tells the ephebic Walton:

You, who call Frankenstein your friend, seem to have a knowledge
of my crimes and his misfortunes. But in the detail which he
gave you of them he could not sum up the hours and months of
misery which I endured wasting in impotent passions. For while I
destroyed his hopes, I did not satisfy my own desires. They were
forever ardent and craving; still I desired love and fellowship,
and I was still spurned. Was there no injustice in this? Am I to
be thought the only criminal, when all humankind sinned against
me? (p. 210)

But separated from his other half, his shadow, the monster
wanders off, presumably to immolate himself.

When the pieces of this side of the puzzle are put together,
they reveal an Oedipal design in the story that explains such
peculiarities as why the monster reacts to the locket-picture of
Frankenstein's mother; why Elizabeth is textually displaced from
"mother" to "sister" to "cousin" to "foundling"; why the monster
reappears on the wedding night; and why the final symbiosis of
monster and man is so fantastic, even dreamlike. All of this
also explains, I think, why the story should appeal to the young
male, for it is clear that such an audience is especially
concerned about the choice between following the unbridled
curiosity that will lead to knowledge and horror (Victor) or
being restrained, which will turn us away from sexual knowledge
but promise safety (Robert Walton) . Once Victor's fictive
journey is over, once his rite of initiation is finished, it
should be clear to us which path we ought to follow. Although
the text captures the limbo of adolescence, lingering between
the two choices, we know that if we are going to be "mature" we
must learn from Victor to follow Robert.

Frankenstein: From the Female Point of View

The horror is equally exciting and sexually implosive from the
female point of view. Although some might think me presumptuous
to give a "feminine" reading of the novel, let me offer here a
few points that have become almost données in recent
Shelley criticism.14 First, at the risk of {56}
committing biographical and intentional fallacies, it is
tempting to extrapolate from the child-bearing events in Mary
Shelley's life to the daemon-bearing event in the life of
Victor. And, second, this single event -- child-bearing and all
that it entails -- seems to be a condensed analogue to what
happens both in and around the text. For here is a novel given
birth by an artist who was almost morbidly obsessed by the
psychological pains and complexities of giving birth.

At the time of Frankenstein's composition, Mary Shelley's
life centered around the paradox of birth. Her own induction
into this world had been powerfully ambiguous: she was born five
months after her illustrious parents, Mary Wollstonecraft and
William Godwin, were married. Clearly they married to legitimize
her, yet her birth divorced them forever. After a particularly
rigorous labor, Mary Wollstonecraft had difficulty expelling the
placenta; infection set in, and eleven days later she died. If
there is one thing the "posthumous child" soon learns, it is
that coming into being is intertwined with departure. It was not
a lesson later lost; in fact, Mary Shelley relearned it again
and again.15
She, herself, had just become pregnant in July 1814 when she ran
off to the continent with Percy Bysshe Shelley. Also pregnant at
the same time was Shelley s wife, Harriet, who was to give
healthy birth in November. Mary was not so fortunate: in
February 1815 she gave birth, or rather in a macabre sense gave
death, to a sickly and illegitimate daughter. She noted in her
Journal only: "Find my baby dead, a miserable day," and a few
weeks later (19 March) she continued, "Dream that my little baby
came to life again; that it had only been cold, and that we
rubbed it before the fire, and it lived. Awake and find no baby.
I think about the little thing all day. Not in good spirits."
She was pregnant again in April. As she carried this child she
was doubtless full of dread and guilt, but this time birthing
was a success. In January 1816, son William was born.16

When the famous pact was made in June 1816 at the Villa Diodati -- a pact that
was as important to the creation of modern horror as the de-
{57} cision by Wordsworth and Coleridge to collaborate on
the Lyrical Ballads has been to modern poetry -- one
might have guessed what Mary would have chosen.17 One does not
have to delve very far below the surface to see that even in her
1831 introduction to the third edition she is still working out
her own mothering anxieties: "I shall . . . give a
general answer to the question so very frequently asked of me --
how I, then a young girl, came to think of and to dilate upon so
very hideous an idea [as the creation of a monster]." What she
does not realize, at least not consciously, is that her
procreative act, what she has had to dilate, efface, and
present, is the opus of art, Frankenstein. The idea may
have come to her in a "dream":

My imagination, unbidden, possessed and guided me, gifting the
successive images that arose in my mind with a vividness far
beyond the usual bounds of reverie. I saw -- with shut eyes, but
acute mental vision -- I saw the pale student of unhallowed arts
kneeling beside the thing he had put together. I saw the hideous
phantasm of a man stretched out, and then, on the working of
some powerful engine, show signs of life and stir with an
uneasy, half-vital motion. . . . His success would
terrify the artist; he would rush away from his odious
handiwork, horror-stricken. He would hope that, left to itself,
the slight spark of life which he had communicated would fade,
that this thing which had received such imperfect animation
would subside into dead matter, and he might sleep in the belief
that the silence of the grave would quench forever the transient
existence of the hideous corpse which he had looked upon as the
cradle of life. (pp. x-xi)

However, the actuality -- the text -- is the compulsive
abreaction of that anxiety. Little wonder that Mary Shelley, now
thirty-two, concludes the introduction to her work at seventeen
by bidding "my hideous progeny to go forth and prosper. I have
an affection for it, for it was the offspring of happier
days. . ."

Ellen Moyers, really the first critic to interpret
Frankenstein as a study of female anxieties, has called
the work "a horror story of teenage motherhood" and she is
right.18 But
it would also be correct to say that Frankenstein is a
study in sexual ontology: how life is created and brought
forward. And this subject seems to mandate horror in the
adolescent fe- {58} male just as incest seems to terrify the
young man. In other words, Mary Shelley did not write a Gothic
story in which we have, say, a young heroine pursued by an evil,
glowering man à la Mrs. Radcliffe; she was not interested
in such fright. Horror is something else, and she knew firsthand
what that was; it was somehow tied up into what she experienced
as a woman -- all the dread, fear, guilt, depression, and
excitement of childbirth. The marvel of her story is not that
she successfully articulated her feelings but that she captured
so well the shared anxieties of her sex.

Psychiatrist Marc Rubenstein has also asserted that for all "its
exclusion of women, Frankenstein is really about
motherhood."19 In fact, young Frankenstein's
progeny becomes a monster not because he violates the demands of
death like the vampire but rather because he has not been
"mothered" properly. What makes him monstrous to the female
audience is not his lust for revenge or his appetite for
violence but rather that he has been made hideous by his
creator's unwillingness to nurture. Little wonder then that the
pubescent female can witness this tale of initiation into the
anxieties of motherhood with as rapt attention as her male
counterpart. To assemble the female side of the puzzle, let us
again return to the text.

Recall that after his own mother died, Victor leaves home to
pursue his own arcane studies at the University of Ingolstadt.
There, although "in my education my father had taken the
greatest precautions that my mind should be impressed with no
supernatural horrors" (p.
50), Victor starts to tinker with the processes of creating
life. "In a solitary chamber, or rather cell, at the top of the
house, and separated from all the other apartments by a gallery
and staircase, I kept my workshop of filthy creations.
. . ." Here, we are told, he spends days and nights at
work -- winter, spring and summer passed away during my labours"
-- until finally in November new life issues forth.

The manufacture of a baby is precisely what is occurring in that
womb-like room at the top of the stairs. The "labour" in that
"filthy workshop of creation" is the unconscious gestation of
new life. And so we should not be surprised when Victor's
creation bears an uncanny resemblance to a human child:

His limbs were in proportion, and I had selected his features as
beautiful. Beautiful! Great God! His yellow skin scarcely cov-
{59} ered the work of muscles and arteries beneath
. . . but these luxuriances only formed a more horrid
contrast with his watery eyes, that seemed almost of the same
colour as the dun-white sockets in which they were set, his
shrivelled complexion and straight black lips. [1.4.1]20

But, of course, this cannot be -- not because it is sacrilegious
or immoral, but because it is so sexually impossible. Life here
is being made without a partner, without copulation, without
sex. It certainly seems easier, but it is not right -- just as
it was not right for Victor to act on the feelings he has for
Elizabeth. And lest we forget that this child-making is not
being done properly, we are respectfully told the issue is
wildly inappropriate: this baby is eight feet tall! Little
wonder that Victor's initial response to his newborn should be
to fall into a deep postpartum sleep.

Mary Shelley tells us the phantasmagoric image of this creature
came to her in a dream, and indeed it still has the ooze of
dream life about it. As is typical in dreams, the one thing this
creature cannot be is the one thing it is: Victor's child. In
horror tales, as in dreams, it is common to have a central
figure perform actions that mock all common sense. It is almost
as if the reasoning powers of the superego must be
short-circuited before the id is allowed out. How could Victor
create a being eight feet tall from normal human parts found in
nearby charnel houses and boneyards? Well, what is King Kong
doing fondling the hand-sized Fay Wray -- this can't be sexual,
not because he is an ape but because he is so big. Or why hasn't
the vampire overpopulated himself into starvation, since his
species grows in geometric progression? In horror stories, as in
dreams, we try to pass by these rational objections because if
we can get past them, we can find what we really want: a
forbidden text of sexuality. So in each monster story that
appeals to adolescents (werewolf, mummy, vampire, transformation
monster) there is some obstreperous contradiction of reality
that must be circumvented; the Frankenstein story is no
exception.

The creation scene ends on a ludicrous note with Victor waking
momentarily to see his progeny peering at him from behind "the
curtain {60} of the bed." He exclaims: "Oh! No mortal could
support the horror of that countenance. A mummy again endued
with animation could not be so hideous as that wretch" (p. 57). Are we getting a
continuation of the rebus-like dream puns with the word/image
"mummy" as we earlier had with "conception," "incredible
labour," "dilate," "workshop of filthy creation," "instruments
of life," and "effacement"? I suspect so, if only because the
train of associations, which initially seemed so helter-skelter,
really does lead directly here to the central actor of
creation: motherhood . . . mother . . .
"mummy."

When the two "selves" of this extraordinary protagonist, Victor
Frankenstein, are reunited we do get an almost clinical
description of the anxieties of latency, for he/she
unconsciously deals with the great biological and psychological
dilemma of adolescence: sexuality and its consequences. How do
we procreate; how is "it" done; with whom; when; what happens
next; and what are we going to do about what we produce?
Frankenstein thus articulates through its buried and
unconscious allegory both the male impulses and anxieties about
incest as well as the female impulses and anxieties about
birthing. It is a horror novel not because there is a huge,
violent, and destructive monster lumbering about the
countryside, but because human desire, our desire, has made this
protoplasm and is strangely motivating it.21

Frankenstein: On Film

I hope that this sense of embedded androgyny in some way
explains why such a clumsy novel by such a green artist could
have achieved such a compelling influence on popular
imagination. What has happened in the retelling of the tale is
that most of the superfluities of the printed text (tedious
travelogues, digressions on contemporary science, descriptions
of Alpine sublimities, extraneous characters) have been sloughed
off in favor of the central acts of creation and sexual quest.
If one doubts that Frankenstein is a central saga of
initiation into adulthood, one need only {61} drop in at the
local Cinema Eight and "see it with your own eyes." The movie is
the ideal form of this saga's transmission, for it much more
nearly approximates the dream context: we sit quietly in the
dark giving ourselves up to a fantasy supposedly beyond our
control. The tensions and fears of our conscious mind are muted,
superego censors are stilled because it is, after all, "only a
movie," only entertainment, only a dream.22

Although Victor and his monster had considerable success on the
nineteenth-century stage (often as a double bill with a vampire
play adapted from Polidori's novella), it is
on celluloid that they have really prospered.23 Not only was
this one of the first stories filmed (in 1910 Thomas A. Edison made a "liberal
adaptation of Mrs. Shelley's famous story," starring the
frantic Charles Ogle), it has also been one of the most
enduring. In general, one need say little more about the film
adventures of Frankenstein other than that they have been
ridiculous, sublime, silly, profound, ludicrous, and unusually
profitable; in fact, they have pretty much paralleled the
fortunes of Count Dracula. When the adaptations are good, they
can be very, very good; but when they are bad, they are just
awful.

What I should like to concentrate on, however, are not the
various renditions of the story-line but rather the mutations in
the character of Frankenstein, for he has been cast -- I suspect
quite unconsciously, until recently -- as bisexual. When we look
at what has happened to the myth as it has evolved on film, what
we see is that the buried sexual content is being progressively
made manifest. And so it should come as no surprise that in the
most successful remake on both stage and screen, The Rocky
Horror Picture Show, the role of Victor is played precisely
for what had previously only been implied, namely androgyny.

Although there is only one great monster (Karloff), there are two great
cinematic Frankensteins: Colin
Clive and Peter Cushing.
Interestingly enough, the moral tones of their characterizations
vary greatly, for {62} Clive plays the young scientist as
upright, considerate, and good (although too curious and
careless), while Cushing plays him as haughty, misogynistic, and
-- especially in the last version, Frankenstein and the
Monster from Hell, 1972 -- downright demonic. But the
sexual, or rather asexual, nature of his character has been
changeless. He is a neuter, clearly sublimating his erotic
energies into the mechanical creation of life. In fact, in all
the Frankensteins at Universal Studios in the thirties and
forties and at Hammer Studios in the fifties and sixties the
creation scene as always played very close to sexual arousal.
The music, the lighting, the responses are blatantly lifted from
their usual matrix -- and with good reason. For, after a great
deal of tantalizing foreplay with electrically charged, sparking
instruments, the scene centers around Dr. Baron Professor
Frankenstein's discovery: "There, you see, it moves, it's
alive; I've made life!" The scene is so visual, so
susceptible to pyrotechnics, that we pass by the latent
sexuality that gives it such inexhaustible attraction.

But this scene is not enough to carry the sagas as the producers
of the most recent Frankenstein on Broadway painfully
learned. It cost them two million dollars to find out that
brilliant sparks, huge beakers of colored water bubbling with
foam, cyclotrons, bolts of lightning, booming organ music, and
disco lighting were not all that the story was about. This
incredibly visual and expensive show opened and closed in one
night (11 January 1981) -- as well it should have, for the
adaptor, Victor Gialanella, did not realize that the real son
et lumiere of the play comes from inside Victor.

James Whale, the virtuoso
screenwriter and director at Universal in the early 1930's,
did. But he was clearly caught short by his intuitive knowledge
that the sexuality of Victor (or "Henry," as he was called for
some unknown reason) was frighteningly implosive, and by the
demands of the "front office" that every Jack must have his
Jill. So Whale set out to rearrange the relationship of
Frankenstein and Elizabeth in a way that both he and the studio
could accept. Of the many things that were added to the saga
because of Whale's genius and Robert Florey's script (Fritz, the
evil hunchback who delivers the damaged brain -- clearly marked
"Abnormal Brain" -- the "doctor," the watchtower laboratory, the
shuffling, addlepated monster) none has been more important than
what he did with Elizabeth. In the 1931 Frankenstein she is
heroic; in fact, she is the one who twice leads the posse
(Victor Moritz and Professor Waldman) to the lab to rescue her
love from the perversion of single sex baby-building. She is
spurned ("You must leave me alone! You'll ruin every- {63}
thing!"), of course, while the menfolk retire to create life on
the operating table; but she will not be easily pushed aside and
continual articulates the need for caution. Even though Henry
assures her that there as nothing to fear," he is a fool and she
knows it. And so when he later grandly announces, "In the name
of God, now I know what it feels like to be God," Elizabeth
seems to realize that the word he wants is not God but
"mother."24

In this context it is interesting to speculate on the
rapprochement that develops between Elizabeth and the monster,
for in a sense both of them are left out and exiled by the
menfolk. Perhaps this is why the creature does not kill her as
in the book but simply appears on the wedding night to give her
a good scare and then hustles off. Admittedly, this is also
because no monster could kill a Hollywood heroine in 1931 and
get away with it; nevertheless -- as we will clearly see in
Whale's Bride of
Frankenstein, 1935 -- there is a bond, albeit
unarticulated, developing between them.

The creature is finally destroyed in a burning windmill after he
has had a chance to heave Henry over the side. Frankenstein's
death (he hits one of the turning vanes on the way down) was to
be the end of the movie, but once again Universal demanded that
no hero of theirs was going to be so shortlived, and so Whale
had him revived and returned to his father. The movie thus ends
with the promise of impending matrimony and a toast to the issue
of the young couple. This ending is certainly the triumph of
moneymakers over moviemakers, for in no way has Victor been
deserving of such salvation.25 He has not learned his lesson.

Universal Studios did; it made about ten million dollars on the
movie and so three years later it was time to ring up the cash
resisters again. This time it was The Bride of Frankenstein --
one of the few Hollywood sequels better than the original. Once
again the role of Elizabeth is pivotal for it is she who
continually explains what Victor is after, but her own desires
are ambiguous. For instance, just who is the "bride" of
Frankenstein? In the movie there are two of them: 1) Elizabeth,
now played by {64} the brunette Valerie Hobson rather than the
blonde Mae Clarke of the first version; and 2) the monster's
intended, the seven-foot Queen Nefertiti with the famous
lightning bolt in her hair, played by Elsa Lanchester. For
literary purists, of course, there can be only one "bride" of
Frankenstein and that is Henry's wife; but for movie buffs
Frankenstein is the monster, and so it is his bride that the
title describes.

The confusion is not without intention, for Whale planned
something quite extraordinary. In The Bride, Whale
attempted to split off the evil aspect of his protagonist and
introduce a mad-scientist, Dr. Pretorious, who would do all the
genetic tampering with life. This meant Henry could remain the
curious but decent scout, while Pretorious did the nasty
things. And the really nasty thing Pretorious had in mind was
to transplant Elizabeth's heart into the body of the female
creature. Unfortunately, this bizarre plot never fully made it
into the finished film, although it came close, and we can still
see that Whale almost had his way. If you remember the film, one
of the most unsettling scenes is when the monster is grandly
presented with his "bride," but she reacts to him as if he were
a pimply blind date. What happened is that this scene was shot
before the "front office" vetoed the transplant idea, and Whale
could not re-do the laboratory scenes since the sets had already
been destroyed. Little wonder she recoils in horror, for she is
to be "mated" to her husband's progeny -- by extension, the
proper issue of her own body! In other words, the same "horror
of incest" that permeates the text of Mary Shelley's novel also
energizes the James Whale movie, except that here it is a
mother/son rather than a brother/sister relationship.

Further evidence of the late script change appears in the famous
explosion scene that occurs when the monster pulls the
"Destruction Lever" (isn't it grand how all laboratories in the
1930's were equipped with such a well-marked lever!). Henry was
initially to be among those destroyed, but since Elizabeth had
been spared her vivisection by the Universal panjandrums --
Karl, Dr. Pretorious' demented lackey, kills an unidentified
woman instead for the "bride's" heart -- Henry must also be
saved. Unfortunately, Whale had already shot the explosion
scene with Henry, and he was not entirely successful in his
attempts to excise Henry in the cutting room (you can still see
Henry getting blown up along with the other mischief makers); so
he added an ending in which Henry and Elizabeth escape and are
last seen silhouetted against the burning tower, presumably
promising never again to meddle in the act of creation. Now, one
hopes, they will go home and make babies the right way.

{66} Universal's subsequent sequels, from Son of Frankenstein (1939) to
Abbott and Costello Meet
Frankenstein (1945), never had such high production
values nor such deep psychological content, primarily because
James Whale had other projects to work on and no one else at
Universal was really interested in the story. It is a tribute to
Whale, however, that in all the sequels the Frankenstein
character remains true to his hebephrenic, asexual self. Even
Mel Brooks's Young
Frankenstein (1975), which affectionately parodies the
Whale Frankensteins as well as Rowland V. Lee's Son of Frankenstein, maintains
the young doctor as hopelessly adolescent and sexually ignorant
-- at least until the end.

In this context it is interesting to see how the screenwriters
of Young Frankenstein (Mel Brooks and Gene Wilder)
resolved the sexual confusions of their callow protagonist, for
comedy -- especially parody -- often lets us see things we would
ordinarily censor if we had to confront them directly. Parody is
thus a slip of the superego's tongue, and so we may well hear in
the parapraxis of Young Frankenstein echoes of earlier
muffled horror. At the end of the film, while the mob is out
chasing the monster, he is, in fact, being seduced by Elizabeth.
Whereas in the novel the monster murders Elizabeth and in
Whale's Frankenstein he simply terrifies her, in Brooks's
version the monster has his cake and eats it too. This has been
the monster's function all along, for he is indeed a
doppelganger projection of the young male, and he is finally --
safely protected in parody -- getting what he wants but should
not have.

So in a sense the monster at last is "young Frankenstein" acting
out the libidinous desires of his maker. And because of his
prodigious size -- a size that extends to all members of his
body -- he is able to satisfy Elizabeth as she has never been
satisfied before. Though detracted by this broad vulgar humor,
we can clearly see the implied adolescent fantasies being played
out. Not only is the id-monster the first to sleep with the
tabooed partner; he is successful beyond his wildest dreams. Now
in a real tour de force -- because the story simply can't end
here (for what would become of the pallid Frankenstein?) --
there is a transfusion of parts between neurasthenic doctor and
prepotent monster. And thanks to the transfusion machine's being
shut off too soon, young Frankenstein ends up the possessor of
the monster's reproductive member. The movie ends with Elizabeth
asking Victor, "The monster got part of your wonderful brain [in
the transfusion], but what did you ever get from him?" And then
she finds out.

The Americans relinquished the Frankenstein saga in the 1950's
and returned it to the English. It was just as well, for nothing
new was being {67} added to the story except werewolves, more
mad doctors, more transplants, and more nonsense. With the
exception of I Was a Teenage Frankenstein, in which the
teen-age "son" kills the father-creator (an Oedipal layer of the
story strangely enough not exploited before), it was a dull time
indeed for this kind of horror story. But after their success
with Horror of Dracula in 1958, Hammer Studios -- then just a
small-time independent producer and distributor -- decided to
remake Frankenstein in its owls image. It was certainly not
going to do it with Universal's images, for Universal's lawyers
had copywritten the moneymaking mise en scene (from Jack Pierce's makeup for Karloff
to Kenneth Strickfaden's
rendition of Frankenstein's laboratory), and the studio was
loath to make any deals with this upstart English studio. So
Hammer did it all its own. In the fifteen years from 1957 to
1972 they made seven full-length features and each of them made
a goodly profit. Having seen them all recently, I was amazed at
how well most of them have held up while so many other horror
movies of this time are so dated and cliched in comparison.27 Think only
of the countless outerspace monsters and mutants -- let alone
killer tarantulas, snakes, rats, even tomatoes -- of this decade
that are not even good enough (or bad enough) to reappear on
middle-of-the-night TV, and one realizes the staying power of
Hammer's efforts.

This staying power is, I think, the same that has compelled
audiences to the Mary Shelley novel and the James Whale films.
The plot is kept simple (some would say simplistic), the anchor
scenes (like the creation) are played to the fullest, and the
sexuality is always there -- embedded, but never discussed.
There are, however, three major shifts in the saga according to
Hammer. First, Frankenstein is no longer the adolescent
overreacher but now a controlled master scientist. To a
considerable degree this shift was mandated by the casting
choice of Peter Cushing, for
he is so urbane and suave that one imagines he couldn't lose
control even if he tried. And, second, the saga is no longer
about creating life, but rather about transplanting life. In the
days of Christian Barnard this was nothing if not relevant, and
now that cloning has come front and center, {68} doubtless the
next Frankensteins will be tampering with strands of DNA. In the
most recent of these English Frankensteins the doctor is
actually transplanting whole brains and even "souls," so one can
well imagine that the possibilities for horror (i.e., tabooed
sexuality) arc vastly increased. These two shifts mandated a
third: the doctor is given all assistant who acts the role of
the ephebic protagonist who draws back the curtains of forbidden
sexual knowledge for a peek. Thanks to the insight of Jimmy
Sangster, Hammer's screenwriter for the first movies, this role
was not given to Igor or Fritz, some demented hunchback, but to
a young, wide-eyed, sexless, lisping helper who stands by the
doctor/father and asks the appropriate questions: "Should we be
doing this? Can you teach me to create life? Here, let me try!"
In other words, this young man is the Frankenstein of the novel
-- except that he is totally guiltless because he is, after all,
"just helping the doctor."

Hence in the Hammer version the adolescent gets it both ways; he
sees how far life is generated by aberrations and he learns by
extension how to be cautious and respectful and heterosexual. To
practice the proper method he is paired with a big-breasted,
gorgeous, nubile girlfriend (this is, remember, a Hammer Studios
production) whom he first spurns when working with the master,
but later embraces after he sees how Frankenstein has botched
it. It is interesting to note in passing that in many of the
Hammer Frankensteins the monster comes back to destroy (not
really, since there must always be a sequel) the father-figure
-- an Oedipal level of the story which could only occur after
Frankenstein the father-creator had been divorced from
Frankenstein the adolescent son.

Of all the Hammer efforts I think the most psychologically
pertinent is the 1967 Frankenstein Created Woman. The
plot, so simple and bizarre, shows how close these latency sagas
are to the fairy tales of childhood.28 Teen-aged Hans is orphaned when
his ne'er-do-well father is guillotined by the town mob. He is
"adopted" by the kind Dr. Frankenstein who is in the midst of
experimenting with cryogenic preservation (remember, this was
hot stuff in the sixties). The doctor experiments on himself and
{69} is amazed to discover that, when frozen, nothing leaves the
body. no soul no spirit, nothing. "Dead for an hour, yet my soul
did not leave my body Now why?" the doctor queries after
defrosting himself.

On a more mundane level, Hans has become friends with Christina
the local innkeeper's daughter. She is stunning: full-breasted
but, alas, painfully shy. Not only does she limp but she also
suffers the anxieties of teen-age compulsion -- one side of her
face is blemished. When she and Hans fall in love, they are
separated by her father who, knowing of Hans's father, does not
consider him "of the proper type." Now into the inn come three
dandies complete with top hats and whiny voices. These
bully-boys want Christina to serve them some wine, but of course
she is mortified to appear in public and they mock and taunt
her. When Hans protects her, they give him a good thrashing for
his trouble, escaping in the melée with his overcoat.

Meanwhile, literally back at the laboratory Dr. Frankenstein is
working in his Hammer-equipped version of the Universal
workshop. There is the inevitable huge water tank that
resembles an oversized aquarium in which bits of human anatomy
usually float about (a visual donnée in the Hammer
creation scene, just as the elevating table had been for
Universal) and there is also the requisite electrical apparatus
-- wires sparks, levers (no "self-destruct" ones, however; these
English are too cagey). The Doctor/Baron, who is up on his
Nietzsche, has finally discovered that no "soul" leaves the body
after death; rather there is a lifeforce: "You see the energy
. . . the force trapped in the cells." The Baron hopes
to use this energy to repair the feeble bodies of the
unfortunate but, alas, he will have no such opportunity, for his
altruistic world is soon overtaken by sad reality.

The three dandies ("Russians," the Baron calls them -- remember
the 1960's?) who stole Hans's coat return to the inn later that
night to steal wine; are discovered by the innkeeper
(Christina's father), whom they kill; and then flee into the
night, leaving Hans's coat. They are successful in framing Hans,
as the police find the coat and, although the Baron testifies as
a character witness, it is not enough; Hans is to be, like his
father guillotined. When Christina finds out, it is too late; he
is decapitated, and despondent, she jumps into the river and
drowns. Now their two bodies are dutifully collected by the
Baron and the operations begin.

Hans's life-force is transferred by the Baron into Christina's
revived body. After the operations arc complete, one by one the
bandages are removed from her body; as the last bandage is
unwrapped we see from his/ {71} her point of view, looking up to
the concerned face of Frankenstein. "Please, please," she/he
asks, "who am I?" And the best the doctor can answer is, "You
are a nice lady." She now becomes, as David Pirie has written,
"an utterly sensual, hermaphroditic and polymorphous perverse
rejuvenation."29 She also becomes stunning to look
at because it seems that the doctor, something of a
dermatologist, takes off her blemish, and, as a bonus, removes
her limp. Christina, inspired by the male life-force of Hans,
now sets about seducing and then decapitating the teddy-boys who
killed her father and framed her boyfriends.

In all of this the Baron is a willing co-conspirator, yet he is
not really evil. Hans is using Christina's sex to wreak his
revenge, and the doctor goes along, realizing that some
restitution of order must be made. Those Russian bullies were
evil, but Hans goes too far by having Christina write his name
in blood after he/she has decapitated the rascals with a meat
cleaver. The townfolk believe Frankenstein must be up to
mischief, and so they dig up Hans's body. They find his body,
but his head is missing -- resting, we now learn, on the newel
post of Christina's bed. It is only a matter of time before the
mob pays the Baron a visit.

The Baron, now fearful for his life, goes off after Christina to
remove Hans's life-force ("call it a soul if you want to") from
Christina's body. But too late. Christina has lured the last of
the scoundrels into an almost surrealistic picnic ground, and
here in this locus amoenus she first entices, then
decapitates her last victim. As Frankenstein happens onto the
scene she is speaking with Hans's voice to Hans's head, which
she is cradling between her hands as Keats's Isabella did with her
Lorenzo. Amazingly, the head replies in her own voice, thereby
mixing forever spiritual, corporeal, and sexual identities. We
have had the doppelgänger motif, always extant in the saga
regardless of rendition, carried about as far as it can go. Poor
Christina/Hans ends it all, finally, by jumping again into the
river and receives once and for all the blessed palliative of a
watery death, just as earlier victor and his monster found peace
in the frozen water of the Arctic. The Baron gets off scot-free
so that he can reappear two years later in Frankenstein Must
Be Destroyed.

If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, parody is the
sincerest form of imitation. For ill parody you must recognize
the essential nature of the subject as well as its effects, and
then you must turn the subject in on itself so that you achieve
the opposite effect. The later Hammer movies, especially The
Horror of Frankenstein (1970) and Frankenstein and the
Monster from Hell (1974), are really inadvertent parodies of
the more vibrant work of Terence
Fisher's Curse of Frankenstein (1957) and Revenge
of Frankenstein (1958). Yet although these later attempts
to retell the saga often degenerated into desultory and febrile
campiness, this blood and bosoms and aquariums had run out of
steam. The same thing happened at Universal in the forties.
But the saga itself is still being told in comics, in movies, on
television, even on breakfast cereals ("Frankenberry"), and --
more importantly -- still being parodied.30

Just as Young Frankenstein parodies the Universal
Frankensteins in what is really an affectionate tribute
to American Expressionism in the horror genre, so The Rocky
Horror Picture Show is a frantic and admiring burlesque of
the Hammer versions as well as the English heritage of slightly
skewed horror. Not only was Rocky Horror filmed at Bray
Studios, where the first Hammer epics were made, it also uses
parts of the sets of such classics as The Curse of
Frankenstein and The Horror of Dracula. And if
Brooks's Young Frankenstein is quintessentially American
in its broad vulgarity and visual puns, then RHPS is
almost a comic book of English schoolboy humor run amok: it is
the Monty Pythons in drag. Its very Englishness may well
account for the fact that the stage musical (The Rock Horror
Show) was a smash hit at London's King's Road Theatre but
flopped on Broadway. The same thing almost happened to the
movie.

The movie, The Rocky Horror Picture Show, is something
quite different from any other parody of the B movie; it is
almost sui generis. It has become the largest
audience-participation film in history (admittedly, not much
competition in this category), drawing enthusiastic fans back
week after week to reenact what has become almost a religious
ritual. Literally from coast to coast each weekend before
midnight (Twentieth Century-Fox has wisely forbidden any other
kind of showing than this Friday/Saturday midnight show)
thousands of adolescents line up in costume and makeup to replay
and mime this mythic rite of initiation. They are increasingly
being joined by their elders who go more to remember than to
participate, for RHPS is not just an entertaining movie;
it is one of the most artful condensation of the anxieties and
excitements {74} of puberty. It does precisely for this
generation what the print and celluloid Frankensteins
have been doing for the last five generations: it provides a
text, quite literally a recitative reading, of the dos
and don'ts of sexuality. Little wonder then that
first-time viewers are referred to as "virgins" by the
"veterans" who have seen the show and are so introduced to the
crowd.

The plot, what there is of it, is a bit more complex than
usual. Brad and Janet, a ridiculously well-washed couple from
the Midwest, drive off after a friend's wedding to consult their
high-school mentor, Dr. Scott, about matrimony -- a necessary
step since Janet has caught the bridal bouquet and Brad has
taken the cue and proposed. En route they are caught in a storm,
have a tire blowout, and take refuge in a remote castle that
conveniently has a sign "Frankenstein Place" out front. The
castle has a rather eerie look to it -- "Enter at your own risk"
the sign also says -- but it is too late to turn back. Along
with Brad and Janet we are led by a menacing nosferatuesque
butler through more doors, over yet more thresholds, until we
enter the grand ballroom filled with a giddy assortment of
penguin-like revelers in spats and sunglasses dancing the Times
Warp." It is clearly a sexual dance ("But it's the pelvic thrust
that really drives you insane"), and Brad and Janet are
understandably hesitant to join the throng. They are confused;
we are too.

Lowered into this melée by elevator is a caped,
white-faced, lipsticked, eye shadowed, sultry dynamo, Dr. Frank
N. Furter. In the first shock of the movie he sings, "I'm a
sweet Transvestite from Transsexual Transylvania," and as he
does he bumps and grinds his way out from beneath his cape. He
is wearing black fish-net pantyhose and a long-line bra. It is
"Fredericks of Hollywood' at Fire Island, yet what makes it so
startling is that it is so alluring. Tim Curry plays the role
with so much gusto and recklessness that it can only be called
lust. He is so gleefully transsexual, so raucously alive, so
husky beneath the sequins that it's hard not to be swept
along.31
Brad and Janet try to resist, but it's clear they are coming
under his spell.

{75} After crossing the "Time Warp" we are all led upstairs to
Dr. Frank N. Furter's laboratory. But wait -- it's the Hammer
laboratory complete with that aquarium and all the electrical
gear, yet the Hammer monster is nowhere in sight. And when Frank
N. Furter unwraps his creation, it is no oversize mongoloid with
a bolt through his neck but a hulk of beefcake in jockey shorts
named Rocky Horror. With clear reference to Hammer's
Frankenstein Created Woman, Rocky's life-force has been
drained from Eddie, a "normal" delivery boy (played by the
corpulent Meatloaf, a rock star in his own right) who has
strayed from the normal and is now being held in cryogenic
suspension. Suddenly Eddie breaks loose from his freezer and
causes mayhem by accelerating around the lab on his motorcycle
until Frank N. Furter brutally bludgeons him to death. It is
shockingly violent, but strangely not out of character, for
Frank N. Furter has always hidden his Charles Manson side with
an overabundance of sexual energy Here, for a moment, we see
violence without sex and it is awful, even terrifying.

We are now prepared, however, for the third shock: Frank seduces
first Janet, then Brad. Janet is upset: "You're to blame! I was
saving myself," she moans; while Brad complains: "You're to
blame! I thought it was the real thing"; but it is clear
that both enjoy forgetting, not who they are, but what they
are. And when these two brittle virgins go, when these eidolons
of middle-class repression fall, there is no norm left. As the
music and dances continually tell us, it is only good fun and
will just last a night. There is no longer any "normal" sexual
identity, so nothing can be wrong. As the dour narrator intones,
"It was a night they will all remember," and one might add, "and
never repeat."

What this movie says (if such a movie may be said to "say"
anything) is that it is okay to be sexually confused; it is okay
for boys to run around in corsets and garters, to prance and
flaunt and dance and sing; it is okay for girls to be naughty
and dirty, to be sexual, bisexual, transsexual -- you name it as
long as you enjoy it. Or perhaps, to be more accurate, it is
okay to pretend to be this way. Still lingering in the
backs of our minds there is always the image of Eddie being axed
to death for staying too long under the spell, for not
pretending but believing. Although we are continually being
assured that what we see on the screen is all an elaborate
trompe l'oeil, a make-believe -- and although a fatherly
narrator often intrudes, assuring us that he is telling us this
story from a big book just as our own fathers once read us into
Fairyland when we {76} were younger -- we realize Eddie's fate
could be ours if we ever took it seriously.

Ironically, for all its sportiness, this movie celebrates the
end of make-believe. It is almost the exit ceremony of
adolescence, the saying goodbye to polymorphous perversity. It
is, in a sense, a modern saturnalia. In "Rose Tint My World"
Rocky sings of this passage:

And somebody should be told
My libido hasn't been controlled
Now the only thing I've come to trust
Is an orgasmic rush of lust
Rose tints my world keeps me
Cafe from my trouble and pain

to which Brad adds:

It's beyond me.
Help me, Mommy.
I'll be good you'll see.
Take this dream away
What's this, let's see
I feel sexy
What's come over me. Whoa --
Here it comes again

Janet continues:

Oh I -- I feel released
Bad times deceased
My confidence has increased
Reality is here
The game has been disbanded
My mind has been expanded
It's a gas that Frankie's landed
Hit lust is so sincere

and Frank N. Furter concludes:

What ever happened to Fay Wray?
That delicate satin-draped frame
As it clung to her thigh
How I started to cry
'Cause I wanted to be dressed just the same.
Give yourself over to absolute pleasure
Swim the warm waters of sins of the flesh
Erotic nightmares beyond any measure
{77} And sensual daydreams to treasure
forever --
Can't you just see it. Oh, oh, hooo. Oh.
Don't dream it.
Be it Don't dream it.
Be it Don't dream it.
Be it Don't dream it. Be it.32

That such sexual exuberance should be tied to the saga-lines of
the Frankenstein story is, as I hope we have seen, predictable.
For victor Frankenstein, bisexual producer of a life turned
monstrous, is simply the converse of Frank N. Furter, monster
producer of a life turned bisexual. The allure of the myth is
the same: we celebrate without real consequence the libidinous
dreams of nonrole, nonspecific sexuality. Incest becomes
possible.

And that, of course, is why there must be horror; society cannot
exist without procreation, and procreation depends on stable sex
roles. The exemplum of what happens if one stays too long under
the spell of Frank is, of course, Eddie. We have earlier seen
Frank brutally axe Eddie to death, and with the unexpected
appearance of the partly paralyzed Dr. Scott (the mentor Brad
and Janet were originally seeking) this part of the story now
becomes clearer. For Eddie, according to Dr. Scott, was a
rebellious child whose only concerns were rock-and-roll music,
motorcycles, and drugs. He presumably has made a "delivery" to
Frank and was entranced. However, by the time he wants out of
"Frankenstein Place" it is too late; he has been used by Frank
in the creation of Rocky and discarded. We now see what has
happened to Eddie, for his rotting, mephitic body is stored
under Frank's cocktail table, and Frank, as one might imaging
makes quite a show of it as his "guests" sit down for drinks. It
is a startlingly gross scene: Eddie's guts spilling out of his
breached stomach, his head cracked and chopped. This scene
finally spoils our fun; it goes too far -- we want out.

It is the bizarre Riff-Raff, a superego of fearsome proportion,
who puts Frank N. Furter back in his proper place. Although Riff
appears to be only a "handyman hunchback," he and his sister
Magenta (one for each sex) are in reality the masters of the
place. "It's all over," they tell Frank. "Your mission is a
failure, your life style is too extreme." And so at the end his
theme song, "Don't Dream It -- Be It," reverts to its sublimated
text, "Don't Be It -- Dream It." When Brad asks Riff-Raff what
{78} Frank has done wrong, it is Dr. Scott (the teacher who has
sublimated his own bisexuality, as we see from his black net
stockings) who answers: "Society must be protected." Riff-Raff
agrees. In a finale worthy of Busby Berkeley, the Marx Brothers,
Esther Williams, and King Kong, Riff-Raff and Magenta destroy
Rocky and levitate the "Frankenstein Place" and all its
inhabitants back to the planet of Transsexual in the galaxy of
Transylvania. Brad and Janet are cast out of the Edenic land of
puberty, now to follow their crippled but steadfast mentor Dr.
Scott into the prescribed sexual world of men and women. We are
returned to the fatherly narrator; he closes the book; the house
lights come up.

There will be many more renditions of the Frankenstein
saga, but I doubt if there will soon be any as perceptive and
artistic as this: Rocky Horror is a celebration of a
meridian crossing, the last stage of infantile sexuality, a
passage, the acceptance of procreative sexual roles. And being
such, it recapitulates, in a sense, the whole history of the
saga. It makes such clear sense of the import of the myth, the
attraction-repulsion that has always been in the character of
Frankenstein, the excitement and the horror.

Notes

1. Of all the periods of sexual growth, latency
has been the least examined, if only because it is so
asymptomatic a passage Oral and anal stages are so obvious by
comparison, but who can observe, say, the development of the
superego? This much, however, seems clear latency occurs between
the approximate ages of seven and fifteen; for boys it is a time
of concealed wishes for incest and patricide, while for girls it
is a time marked by confusions about rape anal anxieties about
reproduction. In both sexes it is a time for what Freud called
"the dissolution of the Oedipus complex" and a growing awareness
of genitality" Both sexes are beginning to have the physiologic
capacity for complete coitus and reproduction as well as all the
confusions such possibilities engender; see Sigmund Freud, "The
Transformations of Puberty" (the last essay of "Three Essays on
Sexuality"), Complete Works, trans, James Strachey
(London: The Hogarth Press, 1953), 7, 207-30; and "The
Dissolution of the Oedipus Complex," CW, 19, 173-79.

2. For interesting articles on the role of
monster movies in modern rituals of initiation see Walker Evans,
"Monster Movies A Sexual Theory," Journal of Popular
Film, 2 (1973), 353-65, as well as his "Monster Movies and
Rites of Initiation," Journal of Popular Film,4 (1975),
124-42.

4. I discuss the "family romance" of the vampire
in general in my introduction to The Living Dead: A Study of
the Vampire in Romantic Literature (Durham, N.C.: Duke
Univ. Press, 1980) and more specifically in "A Psychoanalysis
of the Vampire Myth" American Imago, 37 (1980), 83-92.

5. George Levine, "Review of Recent
Frankenstein Criticism," Wordsworth Circle, 6
(1975), zo8 Although Frankenstein has been relatively exempt
from psychological criticism (most commentators were more
interested in Percy Shelley's role in its composition and
revision), the novel is now getting its full share. For a brief
but concise summary of scholarship, see David Ketterer,
Frankenstein's Creation: The Book, the Monster, and Human
Reality, English Literary Studies Monograph Series, No. 16
(Victoria, British Colombia Univ. of Victoria Press, 1979).

6.The problem of an authoritative text is a
complicated one because we really do not know Mary Shelley's
intentions. For those who like the 1818 text there is James
Rieger's edition of Frankenstein (Indianapolis
Bobbs-Merrill 1974), which gives the variant readings; and for
those who don't really care there is a spate of popular reprints
of the 1831 book. The most important shift for my purposes is
that in the 1818 text Elizabeth is cast as Victor's first
cousin, while in 1831, to avoid any hint of consanguinity, she
is cast as an aristocratic foundling. I will be glossing
quotations from Harold Bloom's Signet Edition (New York: New
American Library, 1965), which is not only the most popular
current edition, but also includes Bloom's provocative
afterword. My major complaint with the edition is that for some
reason the publisher "normalized" the spelling of "daemon" to
"demon," thereby destroying an important distinction. Bloom
seems to realize this, for in his afterword he properly refers
to the creature the way Victor does, as a "daemon." See note 8 below.

7.The lasting nineteenth-century horror stories
include references to almost everything except what they are
really about, namely, tabooed sex. And this excision is why, I
think these stories have endured The one thing Frankenstein,
Dracula, and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde lack is scenes of forbidden
sexuality. That is not the case in the usual Gothic thriller, in
fact, the Gothic melodrama usually makes tabooed sex explicit We
are repeatedly told an the text about the incest of Manfred,
Ambrosio, Cenci, and others -- so much so that Montague Summers
in The Gothic Quest (New York: Russell & Russell,
1964), p. 391, even lists nineteen examples from different
novels of the period in which incest generates the plot The
Gothic novel thrives on overtly Oedipal situations, and
that is partly why, I think, we are no longer interested in
them. When there is knowledge there can be thrills and
titillation, but no horror. Horror is what we must experience
to gain knowledge, albeit unconscious. For more on "forbidden"
sexuality in the Gothic novel, see also Devendra P. Varma,
The Gothic Flame (New York Russell & Russell, 1964),
Chap. 8; Eino Ralio, The Haunted Castle (New York:
Humanities Press, 1964), pp 267-81, Mario Praz, The Romantic
Agony (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1933); and David Punter,
The Literature of Terror (New York: Longman. 1980).

8.Victor's creature, which, since the movies, we
automatically refer to as a "monster," is most often referred to
by Victor as a "daemon." In the M Ii Joseph edition of the 1831
Frankenstein (London Oxford Univ. Press, 1969) the
spelling "daemon" properly indicates Mary Shelley's intention
that the creature represent life that is "other" than human
Unfortunately the Signet Edition, edited by Harold Bloom (see
note 6 above) changes it to "demon," which moans an evil spirit
in the Christian mythology, and hence does real damage to the
characterization of both protagonist and his creation.
Admittedly, the daemon becomes a demon, but this, in part, is
because of the way he is treated.

9. I suppose all the secondary female characters
like Justine are really weak doubles of Elizabeth -- that is to
say, fantasy sisters to Victor. For more on Justine in
particular, see J. M. Hill,
"Frankenstein and the Physiognomy of Desire," American
Imago, 37 (1975), 335-58.

10. The creation of this "bride" of
Frankenstein will become one of the most important additions to
the saga made by the Universal movies, and the studio will make
no attempt to resolve the ambiguity. In fact, at the beginning
of Rowland V. Lee's Son of Frankenstein, 1939, the title
figure (now played by Basil Rathbone) complains that everyone
has confused him with the monster and things only worsen as we
soon learn that even the town is called "Frankenstein"!

11. It is tantalizing to speculate on the
possible influence of Coleridge's Christabel on Mary
Shelley's imagination It is clear -- especially in her note
acknowledging Coleridge in the 1831 edition -- that The Rime
of the Ancient Mariner impressed her, but we also know that
she heard Christabel not once but twice during the summer of
1816. The reason I find this interesting is that I think both
works generate horror by showing a displaced protagonist acting
out forbidden Oedipal desires; see my "'Desire with Loathing
Strangely Mix'd': The Dream Work of Christabel," The
Psychoanalytic Review, 61 (1974), 33-44.

12. The doppelgänger transformation
has been extensively discussed in Masao Miyoshi, The Divided
Self: A Perspective on the Literature of the Double (New
York: New York Univ, Press, 1970); Carl F. Keppler, The
Literature of the Second Self (Tucson Univ. Of Arizona
Press, 1972); Irving Massey, The Gaping Pig: Literature and
Metamorphosis (Berkeley Univ. of California Press, 1969),
and elsewhere. The best psychoanalytic interpretation of the
monster as Victor's double, however, is in Morton Kaplan,
"Fantasy of Paternity and the Doppelgänger Mary Shelley's
Frankenstein" in The Unspoken Motive: A Guide to
Psychoanalytic Criticism, eds Morton Kaplan and Robert Gloss
(New York The large Press, 1973), pp 119-45; and Robert Kiely, The Romantic Novel in
England (Cambridge, Mass., Harvard Univ. Press, 1972), pp.
155-73.

13. The relationship between Robert Walton and
his sister Mrs. Saville (is there a pun here?) mimics the role
of Victor Frankenstein and his "sister" Elizabeth, as many
critics have noted. Once again the doppelganger transformations
and implied incestuous relationships indicate not so much the
author's weakness at delineating character as it does her almost
obsessive compulsion to rework the familial relationships until
she "gets it right." For more on this aspect of the novel, see
Gordon D. Hirsch, "The Monster Was a Lady: On the Psychology of
Mary Shelley's Frankenstein," Hartford Studies in
Literature, 7 (1975), 116-53; and Susan Harris Smith,
"Frankenstein: Mary Shelley's Psychic Divisiveness,"
Women and Literature, 5 (1977), 42-53.

15. Not only is there a problem with surnames
-- because "Shelley" usually refers to Percy -- but at the time
in question (summer 18s6) Mary's last name was Godwin. 1 refer
to her throughout as Mary Shelley simply as a convenience.

16. From a psychoanalytic point of view it is
curious that William, the creature s first victim in
Frankenstein, has the same name as Mary Shelley's father,
brother, and infant son (six months old while she was writing
his name into her story). This child was to die two years later,
and it must have been difficult indeed for Mary to return to
revise the text for the second edition.

17. For more on this famous pact, see James
Rieger's introduction and appendices to his edition of
Frankenstein (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1974), as well
as Robert Harson "A Profile of John Polidori," Diss., Ohio
Univ., 1966, Chap. 4.

19. Marc A. Rubenstein, "'My Accursed Origin,"'
p 165. Rubenstein has some fascinating comments on the character
of Safie's mother who, he claims, is a "distorted but
recognizable cartoon of the author's mother, Mary
Wollstonecraft," p. 169.

20. Page 56. See also Ellen Moyers, p. 77,
where she cleverly compares Victor's description of his newly
created being with Dr. Spock's description of the newborn human
in Baby and Child Care: "A baby at birth is usually
disappointing-looking to a parent who hasn't seen one before.
His skin is coated with wax, which, if left on, will be absorbed
slowly and will lessen the chance of rashes. His skin underneath
is apt to be very red. His face tends to be puffy and lumpy, and
there may be black-and-blue marks. The head is misshapen
. . . low in the forehead, elongated at the back, and
quite lopsided. Occasionally there may be, in addition, a
hematoma, a localized hemorrhage under the scalp that sticks out
as a distinct bump and takes weeks to go away.
. . ."

21. In this context one wonders how aware Mary
Shelley was of the bisexuality of her protagonist. I very much
doubt that Mary Shelley at eighteen, or even at thirty, quite
understood the sexual dynamics of her protagonist, but perhaps
intuitively she did, for she entitled her novel
Frankenstein: Or the Modern Prometheus. In classical
myth Prometheus is both
creator of man, the Prometheus plasticator, and the giver
of fire, the Prometheus pyphoros. These functions, of
course, have clear sexual correlations: the female is the molder
of life, the male is the heroic rebel. In the summer of 1816
Mary Shelley certainly was exposed to both aspects of the myth,
for she was not only reading Ovid's treatment of
Prometheus in Book 1 of the Metamorphosis, but also
doubtless listening to Byron and Percy Shelley discuss their own
renditions ("Prometheus" and Prometheus Unbound).

22.For more on the relationship between dreams
and film (especially horror film), see Robin Wood, "Return of
the Repressed", Film Journal, 14 (July-August 1978),
25-32; and Harvey R. Greenburg, The Movies on Your Mind
(New York: Dutton, 1975), Chaps. 9-11.

23. For extended information about
Frankenstein on film see Donald F Glut, The
Frankenstein Legend (Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1973),
which catalogs every appearance of the Frankenstein monster from
the novel to the breakfast cereal "Frankenberry"; Martin Tropp,
Mary Shelley's Monster (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1977),
chaps. 6-8. Albert J. Lavalley, "The Stage and Film Children of
Frankenstein" in "The Endurance of "Frankenstein,"
(New York: Sterling Publishing, 1980). For more on the Hammer
"Frankensteins" see note 25 below.

24. Elizabeth was not the only one who had
troubles accepting the line; the movie censor at the Hays office
did too. The embarrassment has been resolved by an abrupt
jump-cut from the laboratory to the living room of the Baron
(Henry's father) where the baron claims Henry's problem is with
another woman. Elizabeth ironically assures him this is not
so.

25. When Whale's Frankenstein was
re-released a few years later with his Bride of
Frankenstein, the final scene of the convalescing Henry was
quite wisely removed. The end of Frankenstein is really
a tribute to giddy nonsense, for the Baron (Henry's pompous
father) has the last word, giggling with the servant girls and
drinking wine.

26.The Curse of Frankenstein (1957),
The Revenge of Frankenstein (1964), Frankenstein
Created Woman (1967), Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed
(1969), and The Horrors of Frankenstein (1970) -- the
only one without Peter Cushing and the worst -- and finally,
supposedly Hammer's last, Frankenstein and the Monster from
Hell (1974).

27. I am indebted to the American Philosophical
Society for a grant that enabled me to see the Universal and
Hammer Frankenstein's at the Library of Congress. The
best published accounts of these Hammer epics are The House
of Horror: The Story of Hammer Films, eds. Allen Eyles,
Robert Adkinson, and Nicholas Fry (London: Lorrimer Publishing
Ltd., 1973); and David Pirie, A Heritage of Horror: The
English Gothic Cinema, 1946-1972 (New York: Avon Books,
1973).

28. Since Jung and Freud's rather brief remarks
on the psychoanalysis of fairy tales, the best study has been
Bruno Bettelheim, The Uses and Enchantment: The Meaning and
Importance of Fairy Tales (New York: Random House, 1975).
To the best of my knowledge, however, there are no extended
interpretations of latency sagas, although Les Daniels,
Living in Fear: A History of Horror in the Mass Media
(New York: Scribner's 1975), often skirts the subject as do
Marcus Grant, Horror: A Modern Myth (London: Heineman,
1974); Drake Douglas, Horror (New York: Macmillan, 1966);
many selections from Focus on the Horror Film, eds. Roy
Huss and T. J. Ross (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall,
1972); and Carlos Clarens, An Illustrated History of the
Horror Film (New York: Capricorn, 1968).

30. Of the recent revivals, two are worthy of
note: Frankenstein: The True Story, with a screenplay by
Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy, has Dr. Polidori (played
by James Mason) cast as the evil scientist; and Paul Morrissey's
Andy Warhol's Frankenstein, which attempts to shock by
its 3-D technique, but intermittently nauseates (as buckets of
blood were poured from the screen), and bores. Of interest,
however, is that Baron Frankenstein (played by Udo Kier) is
aggressively and unremittingly androgynous.

31. Tim Curry's talent for portraying androgyny
was not lost on the critics: he was considered "half Auntie
Mame, half Bela Lugosi," "a cross between Greer Garson and Steve
Reeves," "a hybrid of Sophie Tucker and Mick Jagger," "a
combination of early Joan Crawford, Francis Lederer and Carmen
Miranda," "Little Richard meets Elsie Tanner," "part David
Bowie, part Joan Crawford, part Basil Rathbone," "Imagine Liza
Minnelli in 'Cabaret,' Alice Cooper at his most demonic, Jagger
at his most sensual. Then throw in Vincent Price and Bowie's
drive for neuter sex," "Charles Laughton, doing Captain Bligh,
and Nita Naldi at the same time," as quoted in Bill Henkin,
The Rocky Horror Picture Show Book (New York: Hawthorne
Books, 1979), p. 133.